ITIL® Foundation Exam Top Tips - Part 1 - How to Prepare

Before the exam

Taking an ITIL Foundation course and sitting the Foundation Exam is a great way to start your ITIL journey. Here are our Top Tips to help you get the most from the course and pass your exam:

Read around the topic before you start. It will help you hit the ground running once the course begins. There are loads of different sources of interesting and relevant content, so dig deep to find what works for you.

Ask questions during the course. Lots of questions. Ask again if it’s still not clear. Understanding the concepts will help you answer the questions that could trip you up in the exam. Understanding is what the examiners are looking for you to demonstrate.

Because everything in ITIL is interlinked, your trainer may have to introduce concepts early on that won’t be covered in depth till later on. If in doubt, ask!

Make lots of notes, especially on concepts you have difficulty with. Fill in those knowledge gaps and you will take the exam with a lot more confidence.

Use real world examples - Don’t be afraid to ask how ITIL relates to your own workplace experience. Your instructor is likely to use real examples - feel free to create your own.

The questions asked in the Foundation exam are designed to test your knowledge of ITIL theory as stated in the publications and training. It is possible when answering these questions to ignore the small nuances that real world scenarios might create.

The exam treats the five ITIL life-cycle stages as discrete units, though in reality they are very closely interlinked. Continual Service Improvement, for example, runs through everything in ITIL.

Sit a sample paper or two if you can. It will give you great confidence that you know your stuff and can help identify areas to improve on. For questions you got wrong, work through the answers until you understand where you made your mistake. You can download a Foundation sample exam paper here.

If you take a sample paper at the end of the first day of your course, don’t get too disheartened if you didn’t score enough marks to a pass the exam. You have two more days’ worth of training to go through. The answers to some of the questions you got wrong will be covered during subsequent days.

Use other study aids - Do you know there is an AXELOS Foundation ITIL App, which contains hundreds of sample questions, along with the rationale for the answers?

Give yourself a head start - Before your exam, you will be asked if you would like to be part of the online Successful Candidates Register. Make sure you sign up to ensure that you can show employers and recruiters that you’re certified.